ICX 7150-48P

Brocade ICX 7150 Switches

On December 7th, Brocade publicly announced the latest addition to their campus LAN Ethernet switching portfolio, the Brocade ICX 7150. The ICX 7150 is an entry-level campus switch with an entry-level price point to match. The ICX 7150 fills a gap at the lower end of the price / performance spectrum for Brocade and allows Brocade to offer their products to a larger number of customers and for a broader spectrum of use cases. The built in and field upgradeable 4 ports of 10 Gig, the ability to stack up to 8 units in a single stack with 320 Gigs of aggregated stacking bandwidth, and full PoE on all ports offers an enterprise feature set for what promises to be an extremely competitive price.

The ICX 7150 is available in three port density configurations: 12, 24 and 48 port 10/100/1000 models with 1 Gig / 10 Gig stacking or uplink ports. It also offers both PoE and PoE+ for customers looking to power Ruckus APs, VoIP phones, surveillance equipment or other network devices.

The ICX 7150-C12P is especially interesting. This compact, 12 port switch, offers PoE on all ports. In addition, it is fanless, which opens up many use cases in noise sensitive environments like classrooms, retails stores and small offices. The ICX 7150-C12P promises to quickly become one of Brocade’s highest selling products.

Highlights include:

Offers enterprise-class stackable switching at an entry-level price, allowing organizations to buy what they need now and easily scale as demand grows and new technologies emerge

Enterprise-class performance and scalability with up to 4×10 GbE SFP+ ports for stacking1 or uplinks

Delivers class-leading stacking1 scalability with up to eight switches per stack, 320 Gbps of aggregated stacking bandwidth, and long-distance stacking up to 10 km using standard optics

Scale-Out as Demand Grows
The Brocade ICX 7150 is easy to deploy, manage, and integrate into both new and existing networks. Organizations can buy only what they need today, and easily scale out as demand grows and new technologies emerge.

Brocade Ethernet switch stacking2 technology makes it possible to stack up to eight Brocade ICX 7150 switches into a single logical switch. This allows the Brocade ICX 7150 to deliver a class-leading 320 Gbps of aggregated stacking bandwidth and offer simple and robust expandability for future growth at the network edge. This stacked switch simplifies management with only a single IP address and offers transparent forwarding across a pool of up to 400×1 GbE ports and 32×10 GbE ports. When new switches join the stack, they automatically inherit the stack’s existing configuration file, enabling true plug-and-play network expansion. Flexible licensing of 1 GbE to 10 GbE ports for uplink and stacking allows organizations to optimize network performance based on specific requirements. Brocade stacking technology also delivers high availability, enabling instantaneous hitless failover to a standby stack controller if the master stack controller fails. In addition, organizations can use hot-insertion and removal of stack members to avoid interrupting network services.

SDN-Enabled Programmatic Control of the Network
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a powerful new network paradigm designed for the world’s most demanding networking environments and promises breakthrough levels of customization, scale, and efficiency. The Brocade ICX 7150 enables SDN by supporting the OpenFlow 1.3 protocol, which allows communication between an OpenFlow controller and an OpenFlow-enabled switch. Using this approach, organizations can control their networks programmatically, transforming the network into a platform for innovation through new network applications and services.

The Brocade ICX 7150 delivers OpenFlow in true hybrid port mode, which allows organizations to simultaneously deploy traditional Layer 2/3 forwarding with OpenFlow on the same port. This unique capability provides a pragmatic path to SDN by enabling network administrators to progressively integrate OpenFlow into existing networks, giving them the programmatic control offered by SDN for specific flows while the remaining traffic is forwarded as before. Brocade ICX 7150 hardware support for OpenFlow enables organizations to apply these capabilities at line rate.

Simplified, Automated Deployment with Auto-Configuration
The Brocade ICX 7150-24, the Brocade ICX 7150-48, and the Brocade ICX 7150-C12P compact switch feature a fanless design that enables them to operate silently. The Brocade ICX 7150-24P and the Brocade ICX 7150-48P offer a “fanless mode” configuration option, enabling these switches to operate with the fan disabled while providing a PoE budget of 150 watts.
This Brocade-exclusive feature enables the Brocade ICX 7150 Switches to be deployed outside of the wiring closet without disrupting the environment. This capability is critical for organizations such as hospitality, education, healthcare, and retail where networking equipment needs to be deployed into a work environment or living space such a classroom, hotel room, patient room, operating room, or retail space with minimal disruption.

Enterprise-Class Availability
When every second matters, the Brocade ICX 7150 Switches help deliver continuous availability to optimize the user experience. Brocade stacking technology delivers high availability, performing real-time state synchronization across the stack and enabling instantaneous hitless failover to a standby controller in the unlikely event of a failure of the master stack controller. Organizations also can use hot-insertion/removal of stack members to avoid interrupting service when adding a switch to increase the capacity of a stack or replacing a switch that needs servicing.

In addition to stack-level high availability, Brocade ICX 7150 Switches also support stack level ISSU3 (In Service Software Upgrade), a unique capability that enables a Brocade ICX 7150 stack to go through a software upgrade without service interruption.

Unified Wired/Wireless Network Management with Brocade Network Advisor
Managing enterprise campus networks continues to become more complex due to the growth in services that rely on wired and wireless networks. Services such as Internet, e-mail, video conferencing, real-time collaboration, and distance learning all have specific configuration and management requirements. At the same time, organizations face increasing demand to provide uninterrupted services for high-quality voice and Unified Communications (UC), wireless mobility, and multimedia applications.

To reduce complexity and the time spent managing these environments, the easy-to-use Brocade Network Advisor discovers, manages, and deploys configurations to groups of IP devices. By using Brocade Network Advisor, organizations can configure Virtual LANs (VLANs) within the network, manage wireless access points, and execute commands on specific IP devices or groups of IP devices. sFlow-based proactive monitoring is ideal for performing network-wide troubleshooting, generating traffic reports, and gaining visibility into network activity from the edge to the core. Brocade Network Advisor centralizes management of the entire family of Brocade wired and wireless products.